Read Hall, opened in September 1903, was the first dormitory for women at the University of Missouri. “The rooms in Read Hall are single and in suites, and are furnished with single bed, chiffonier, washstand, study table and two chairs for each occupant.” To find out more about other early dormitories and fraternity houses on campus, check out Student homes of the University of Missouri.

National Pancake Day, March 5th, is again upon us. Planning an elaborate breakfast to celebrate? Thankfully, publications by the University of Missouri Extension in MOspace are here to lend a hand with recipes and pointers. Here are some tips from “It’s Party Time.”

Bake until bubbles appear at the edges of the cake. Turn only once.

A slightly lumpy batter makes the lightest pancakes.

The cakes will have a better appearance if all the batter to be used in one cake is poured at once. “Spooning it out” in small portions is messy.

For more tips and for recipes, visit MOspace to check out “It’s Party Time,” and other publications related to pancakes and all types of foods for all diets and seasons.

Note: MOspace is an archive for University of Missouri Extension publications. Visit the MU Extension site for the most up-to-date information and publications.

Digital Services at the University Libraries was a busy time for us in 2018. We worked with MU students, faculty and staff to add their works to MOspace, the online institutional repository for MU. We managed MOspace by making those resources widely available to researchers around the world.

We juggled a lot of projects with the goal of providing online access to useful resources. One of our projects was to digitize and make unique and special materials in our library collections available in the MU Digital Library and the HathiTrust, a digital library with content from research libraries and others.

See below for a sample of the projects we completed last year that we are excited to show off to the community.

In honor of Armistice Day, Digital Services and Special Collections added five new items to the HathiTrust. These five items, from the University Libraries collections, offer unique perspectives on World War I. Each of these is a new addition to the HathiTrust Digital Library.

Missouri and the War, by Floyd C. Showmaker, gives a wide array of information about how Missouri joined the rest of the nation’s call to join the fight against the Central Powers. This item gives farm outputs by cities in Missouri, lists of Missouri war heroes and in what country they fell, as well as a report about a person from St. Louis who discovered a treatment for poison gas.

To Dr. William Krause, education needs to be open and without borders. “We should share information. Not hold it for a select few to access.”

Since the beginning of his Mizzou career in 1971, Dr. Krause has been a proponent of helping students learn and giving them the resources they need. “I’ve always felt very strongly that any student, under my tutelage, should have all their materials provided for them.” He even went as far as writing a couple of textbooks, streamlining them to fit the educational needs of the medical students and taking the extra step to find a publisher to make the textbooks as cheap as possible.

For several years, Dr. Krause taught 96 medical students anatomy and histology. “It was very difficult for me to rotate to all the groups in the labs and answer their questions about the slides. [They] would get frustrated waiting to get my help,” says Dr. Krause. Wanting to make sure his students received the help they needed, he applied for and was awarded a grant to work with a multi-headed microscope for help sessions. With this new equipment, he could easily show this large group the slides. “After three or four years of doing this, even those sessions became too crowded. Everyone wanted the extra help.” Dr. Krause knew he had to find a better way to help his students. When a new chair of the department came on board, Dr. Krause took the opportunity to pitch the chair his new idea.

Screenshot of Dr. Krause’s Blood and Bone Marrow Video

“I wanted to place a camera in the eye piece of the microscope and record me narrating and using the electronic pointer in real time.” The new chair was sold on the idea and gave him the go ahead to buy and use any equipment he needed to create these videos. Dr. Krause developed a set of 24 video tutorials and provided DVD copies for each medical student. That’s a total of 2,304 DVDs per year, mostly out of his own pocket. Eventually, it became too expensive to continue making copies, not to mention the DVDs would damage over time. Dr. Krause turned to the library and asked how could he still provide access to these videos while finding cheaper means of doing so.

Diane Johnson at the Health Sciences Library suggested adding them to Google as it was new and could handle 96 students watching 24 videos. Once placed on Google, Dr. Krause started receiving notes of gratitude not only from his students, but from students all over the world thanking him for sharing his knowledge. After a few years, Google wanted Dr. Krause to shorten the videos. Dr. Krause felt that shortening them would make the videos less helpful. Once again, he turned to the library.

Wanting to keep the integrity of the videos, while still keeping freely available, Dr. Krause consulted with Diane Johnson about how best to proceed. She suggested the new repository the library was managing: MOSpace. Following her advice, Dr. Krause added the videos, along with accompanying educational pdfs, to MOSpace. “I was happy to add to MOSpace. It gives the opportunity for people to tap into information from anywhere and makes it more universal,” explains Dr. Krause.

Top Countries by Downloads from April 2018-October 2018

Dr. Krause, while retired now, still continues to help students here at Mizzou and all over the world. With a total of 4,053 views for the videos and close to 19,000 views for the educational pdfs, users are still finding Dr. Krause’s collection. During the month of September 2018, his videos were downloaded over 800 times.

Dr. Krause cannot be more excited about the open education movement at Mizzou. He may have missed the initiative by three years, but he is happy to know that things are changing on campus. “I am delighted I’ve been able to help so many people from so many areas. This is such a tremendous avenue to make material available in the easiest format possible for our students at [little to] no cost.”

Dr. Krause’s videos, blogs and textbooks are found in MOSpace, where they are free to view and download.

Cycle of Success is the idea that libraries, faculty, and students are linked; for one to truly succeed, we must all succeed. The path to success is formed by the connections between University of Missouri Libraries and faculty members, between faculty members and students, and between students and the libraries that serve them. More than just success, this is also a connection of mutual respect, support, and commitment to forward-thinking research.

If you would like tosubmityour own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.

MOspace, the University of Missouri institutional repository, will soon include DOIs. DOIs – Digital Object Identifiers – offer a persistent way to reference and access online documents. Style guides, such as APA, require that DOIs be included in citations when they are available.

Assigning DOIs to items in MOspace will be advantageous for authors and researchers. Authors will have a widely recognized identifier for their works. Researchers will have a persistent way to cite and access MOspace items of interest to them.

This positive development for MOspace was made possible thanks to the advocacy of our librarians, exploration by MOspace staff, and approval and support from library administration.

DSpace is a community-based, open source project that produces the DSpace repository platform. With a 16-year history, strong membership support, and active participation from a wide variety of stakeholder institutions located all over the world 2017-2018 was a year of progress toward the key community priority of developing and releasing DSpace 7 with a new, single Angular user interface and enhanced REST API. The technical roadmap for 2017 is focused on DSpace 7 development. As a production repository DSpace needs to meet the needs of large and small stakeholder institutions, so minor updates have been released as needed. At the same time the bulk of technical efforts were focused on DSpace 7 which included a great deal of groundwork and foundation support for the new REST API. Plans for a Beta release of DSpace 7 with support for entities are on track for early 2019. Building and sustaining a strong community is a central goal for the DSpace Project.

Labor Day, celebrated this year on September 3, is the national holiday during which we pay tribute to the social and economic contributions of American workers. The American workforce is a focus of some of the research conducted by graduate students at the University of Missouri and documented in theses and dissertations available in MOspace, the University of Missouri institutional repository. Below are examples of theses and dissertations from a range of departments which feature informative perspectives on the economic and social progress of the labor movement and focus on the expanding workforce in American society.

In MOspace you also will find older theses and dissertations. We are adding these as part of an ongoing project to digitize and provide online access to pre-1978 theses and dissertations. An interesting example is a 1915 thesis from the Department of Sociology. As part of this thesis, University of Missouri student Mabel Griffith researched the working conditions of women in the laundry industry in Columbia. In her study, Griffith surveyed thirty-one women in the laundry industry. She benefited from access to pay-roll records in order to tell the story of the work and home life of these wage-earning women. Read more in Women in the laundry industry in Columbia.

MOspace celebrated a 10th birthday on July 1. We held a celebration for library employees this month and will plan for publicity for campus this fall.

DOIs are coming. MU Libraries are in the process of joining CrossRef, a DOI registration agency. Soon, we will assign DOIs to MOspace content, making it easier for users to cite our content.

DSpace updates

MOspace is delivered using DSpace, an open-source repository software platform. DSpace code is undergoing a significant rewrite and the new version, DSpace 7, will include major improvements. Of note are easier ways to customize design and functionality and an increased ability to integrate with content from other sources such as ORCID. In addition, there will be improved searching and display features. An exciting development is the expansion of DSpace to accommodate entities other than resources (e.g., articles, presentations, and datasets). DSpace 7 will include options to include author profile pages, journal issue viewers, and funding agency information. DSpace 7 is due to be released in early 2019. Felicity Dykas serves on the DSpace 7 Outreach Grou

A 2017-mid-2018 DSpace annual report is almost completed. This will be the first annual report issued and highlights a focus on increased outreach and communication with the DSpace community and potential DSpace installations.